Executive Summary
The USA and China will continue to lead global computing, but the GCC can aspire to become the third significant pole of AI, with its export-oriented cluster growing from roughly 1 GW today toward 3 GW or more by 2030.
The report indicates that the scale of the region's commitment is best measured through its project pipeline: more than 174 active and planned data centre projects worth over USD 93 billion, against a GCC colocation market of only about USD 4 billion in 2025 — close to 1.3 per cent of the global market. Sovereign wealth funds such as PIF, ADIA and Mubadala are underwriting these projects, allowing them to reach financial close without the pre-leasing private developers elsewhere require, while national AI strategies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE treat compute capacity as sovereign infrastructure rather than a commercial service.
The analysis suggests that the GCC's advantages are of unequal durability. Cheap power (Saudi commercial electricity at roughly USD 0.074/kWh), sovereign capital and greenfield AI-ready design are structural and will persist. Connectivity and chip access, however, are conditional and revocable — the first dependent on subsea cable corridors through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, both of which were compromised simultaneously during 2026, and the second on a US export-licensing regime administered outside the region. As GCC states head toward 2030, the strategic imperative is to convert these conditional advantages into structural ones, positioning the region as a genuine third pole in global AI infrastructure and the leading digital hub for the Middle East, Africa and parts of South Asia.
